In the field of petrochemicals, escalating energy costs for oil, natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), and liquefied natural gas (LNG) are of increasing concern to those involved in the processing of organic materials, chemicals, and petroleum products. With the inherent aging of the facilities, coupled with the ever-escalating energy and capital equipment costs, refurbishment and replacement costs of these plants becomes increasingly difficult to justify. Many efforts have been expended in those applications described in the Technical Field to produce directly useable fuels from scrap tires or plastics without further treatment, substantially improve throughput, increase operating efficiency, or reduce energy consumption, but have failed due to economic or technical reasons. The present invention achieves all of these objectives through the direct application of high-density microwave energy to various organic materials, while simplifying the process methods and apparatus.
This invention addresses the problems of accumulation of waste products including tires, plastics, roofing shingles, construction debris in ever-decreasing space in landfills. In the United States, as of the filing date of this application, only six hazardous disposal landfills remain available for an ever-increasing amount of industrial waste, contaminated soil, and materials removed from locations designated by the EPA as superfund sites. Considering that a new petroleum refinery has not been built in over approximately thirty years, discovery of new major sources of crude oil have been declining over the past decades, and the number of new landfills for waste materials, hazardous and non-hazardous, are not only decreasing, but existing landfills are reaching their capacity, a conversion of waste products into useable byproducts is a requisite to overcome these problems.
Considerable effort and expense has been invested in waste-to-energy and alternate fuels programs, but have fallen short due to technical issues, limited throughput, expensive after-treatment costs, poor operating efficiency, high energy consumption, or non-commercially viable solutions.
This present invention addresses each of the above waste issues and provides an efficient, cost-effective solution to substantially reduce the amount and type of waste transported to the landfills. In addition, the use of microwave energy to overcome the waste disposal problems is simple and elegant, compared to existing methods.